Transitions are hard. Endings are hard. When I was younger and doing theatre I would get positively devastated about closing nights. I remember when I was twelve an older actor I did a show with saw me getting tearful after our last performance and said to me, "My darling, without closings you can't have opening nights". I've thought about this at many important junctions in my life.  I am thinking about it now with closing of the show I'm doing lurking just around the corner. 

I'm not only closing the play, but also closing yet another chapter of transition. With those closings always comes a rush of uncertainty. Being in my hometown to do what I love has been a beautiful means of making me feel lit up from within and valuable again, but it was also partially an escape from the uncertainty of what would happen next for me after "The Year that Miscarriage Built". Leaving home to do the play greatly reduced the possibility of jumping back into Baby on the Brain which also had the side benefit of keeping me safe from the fear of more reproductive drama. Now I have no more excuses other than to face the music and see what happens. If it works out then great and if it doesn't I will have to deal with that too. Spending time resisting the uncertainty of that is not doing me any favors.

I've been thinking about Buddhism a lot and the concept that trying to push negative emotions away only intensifies them. I'm doing my best to lean into the things I am feeling as a way of unlocking an even more present and mindful way to manage the fear of the next step. Our human brains constantly seem to seek zones of safety which inevitably fall apart because the world is inherently unsteady and uncertain. We spend so much energy trying to reconstruct our crumbling safety zones that we miss out on what is right in front of us. I am guilty of this pretty consistently. I am constantly grasping at the "right" path, the thing I'm "supposed" to be doing or feeling, or the comfort of a pattern. 

Miscarriage (just like all traumas) tends to really hit home the message that "life is uncertain" (yes, thank you, I probably could have done without this particular reminder, but there you have it). The truth is, though, that the message of uncertainly is present even when things are going seemingly perfectly (and if they are for you please contact me so I can ask you how the heck you're managing that). The not-knowing is scary, but it is also what makes life an adventure. I'm about to step into another new chapter and it is wildly terrifying, but when things are the most terrifying they also have the most potential to be magnificent. Often I catch myself waiting for life to "calm down" or "smooth out" before I really get down to business. It's clear now that that's not how life works (in fact it's probably just the opposite). Life will always be unclear, bumpy, confusing, and wonderfully messy. I think its high time I did my best to make friends with that uncertainty so it works with me instead of against me. I'm about to endure the heartbreak of a closing wrapped in a closing, but I will try to keep faith that an even more spectacular and unexpected opening is around the corner. I will try to remind myself that the unforeseeable is not an enemy, it's an opportunity. 

Hey, does everyone remember my best friend Jeremy (Ever Forward Blog recurring character)? In celebration of the fact that I am going to see him TOMORROW for the first time in a month and a half (which has been a slow and painful death of my soul that I do NOT care to ever repeat...from here on out we can only be cast in plays as a pair), I dedicate this blog post to a concept to which he introduced me. 

A while back, Jer shared with me this New York Times article about the concept of "thin spaces". We've woven that idea it into our lives quite a bit since then. To quote the author of said article (Eric Weiner), "thin spaces" are "locales where the distance between heaven and earth collapses and we’re able to catch glimpses of the divine, or the transcendent or, as I like to think of it, the Infinite Whatever". Ok, this seems very grand. But really what we're talking about here is finding those spaces that just click, the atmospheres where you feel like the best version of yourself, and where that version comes easily, like breathing.  The article talks about thin places more as physical locations that are so at one with themselves that you can't help but feel that same way when you are in them, but I feel they can be more of an intangible state too. I find thinness  in a particular song, a mind space that offers a moment of blinding clarity, or with company that lights me up from within--I think it can be any moment where you unexpectedly find yourself closer to the Eternal Everything. Best of all, a thin place shakes you up from the inside out. It disorients you spiritually and makes you look at things in a different way while simultaneously boiling you down to your most true self. 

I've been thinking about thin places a lot lately because I think its one of the few ways I can find to describe the sensation of terror and exhilaration and silliness and comfort and heartache I feel in the darkened wings of a theatre right before I step onstage and then as soon as I step off. I get this same sense of heady thinness when walking into the empty theatre before a performance when the lights are still dimmed, the smell of upholstered audience chairs and scenery dust hangs on the air, and everything is absolutely quiet with the knowledge that in a matter of an hour or two the room will burst into life. That buzzing energy can only be described as my own personal slice of the Divine. With the run of my play being at the halfway point I am once again facing a moment of transition in the road ahead. I'll be leaving the cocoon of one magnificently thin space and journeying out in search of the next (or with the hopes that it will find me). 

Before The Great Reproductive Apocalypse of 2014™ (just kidding, you know I have no clue how to "TM"), I used to always think that pregnancy would be like the ultimate mobile thin space for me.  Since I was young I would hear stories from my mom about how blissfully happy she was when she was pregnant and I expected nothing different. As a little girl I would play mommy with the detailed authority of a 5-year-old that knew precisely what she was born to do one day. So many times since my miscarriage I have wondered if I will be able to have an experience anywhere close to blissful when I get pregnant again (notice the positive "when" language I'm using to trick the universe? that works right?). Will it be possible to cultivate that energy around me despite knowing what I know? Can a thin space exist when the air is choked with the ghosts of a past trauma? Sure, I think so, I just don't know quite how yet, but as usual, I'll jog ahead and let you know what I see.

Once the world breaks your heart in some way (and it seems to come for all of us at some point, doesn't it?), I guess there are always going to be fractures that don't quite re-set as they were before. You find yourself questioning things you never questioned and parts of you that were as deeply engrained as your very identify heal into something slightly alien. I would argue also, though, that this healing process makes feeling things even more intense and wonderful despite the accompanying confusion and disorientation. Thin and thick places are constantly in flux and what made you feel like you were coming home to yourself one minute may evaporate without warning, but I think perhaps there is an even higher incidence of  locating heavenly "thin spaces" when you've been to hell and back. The shattered pieces of your heart reflect and illuminate in a new way that lights your pathway toward collapsing the space between you and the magic of the Universe. 

I read an article recently about the neurological changes that occur when one becomes pregnant and gives birth to a child. 

The article talks about the intense internal shifts that the body and brain undergoes. I mean, I or anyone who has experienced it, could certainly have told them that. The moment I was pregnant, my blood started pumping differently, my hormones rioted, my heart felt as if it was swelling to the point of explosion. The momentum forward was terrifying and exhilarating until it all crashed to halt. It makes perfect sense that my gray matter was also undergoing massive renovations at that time. The article I read likens motherhood to "discovering the existence of a strange new room in the house where you already live". All these brain changes and hormones prepare you to bond with your child when he or she arrives. They prepare you to be something that has been within you the whole time, just waiting.

My question is, what happens to those neurologic structural shifts in those of us that don't get the opportunity to see the pregnancy all the way through? Few people talk about that.  Do those internal transformations get smoothed out and then washed away like pebbles on the beach or are we left to sit in this new room that was built with nothing to fill it? If my apartment was big enough to have cleared a room for a nursery before I miscarried, I imagine it would feel a little something like that. If Motherhood is a new room that you never knew you always had, then miscarriage is much like having an empty room within your home that has tiny toys and tiny shoes but no tiny hands and feet to match them. I found myself feeling like both a stranger and a natural in that room and it's an odd cocktail of comfort, confusion, and pain. 

I suppose if those neurological modifications do stay in place, they must end up getting reallocated elsewhere. It's hard to decipher where exactly when you are in the fog of depression, but once that begins to clear, it's not so much of a stretch to start to look around you and notice the places that the extra helping of nurture, protective energy, and maternal perception may have landed. For me, I see it in the way I care for my little chosen family in the city (first kind of annoyingly in the manner of force-feeding them soup and fussing over them incessantly, but then in a more--I'd like to think--tolerable and easy-to-appreciate way), I see it in the way I fiercely protect the ones I love and the things I believe in, I see it in the way I value the small moments of beauty that are given to me on a daily basis because I know for certain that nothing is permanent. I guess in a perfect world those biological alterations are turned back onto one's self and relationships in a positive way. 

I remember thinking a lot about postpartum depression when I miscarried. Not that I can speak from direct experience, but if we are going to keep going with this metaphor, I imagine postpartum depression is like walking into a room where you expected to feel at home only to find that you do not recognize your surroundings at all. Postpartum is a phenomenon that also doesn't get enough airtime, but that's not the only thing linking it to miscarriage in my perception. Postpartum is directly related to the emotional and hormonal hangover that exists after having a baby. There are certain expectations of how you are "supposed" to feel after you give birth, and falling short of that only intensifies the pain. In the case of miscarriage you may not have carried a baby for nine months, but you still underwent a massive emotional and physiological overhaul, had all those maternal expectations, and even experienced the pain of contractions or surgical intervention at the end (or both if you're lucky like me). Then you walked away with no baby to serve as a salve to your soul. That physical, emotional, and spiritual hangover after miscarrying is the very substance that makes up the fog I've been weed-whacking through over the last year. 

As the days and weeks draw on I can't help myself from continuing to look at this whole experience from a million different angles. Aspects of it make more or less sense and new lenses emerge through which things become more or less clear. Maybe that too is part of the process of how the body and brain heals from miscarriage. At first the physiological shifts make it impossible to have any sort of clarifying distance (so if you are in that place give yourself a dang break!! you're only human!!). We are all subject to the wild ride of hormones and brain chemistries. "Mommy brain" is a thing I always hear new moms talk about and it's surely more than just being exhausted and overwhelmed. It's about learning to walk around with the internal renovations that have occurred over the last 9 months--that is no small feat (moms are superheroes!!) So for the babyless mamas out there who feel they are going absolutely mad, maybe take comfort in the fact that you too are reconciling walking through the world with would-be mommy brain. It isn't easy to do right away, but I think there are ways to embrace the thwarted neurological preparations and make them work for you. Even if those changes happened without a baby to share them with, you can share them with the world and they can become a positive part of the evolving woman who walked through the fire of this experience. 

On Saturday, I looked at the date on my phone and realized a year had passed. It was one year ago that we sat in the choking silence of a darkened ultrasound room and felt the world crash down around us as we were told there was no more heartbeat (I wrote about that day here).  A whole year now stands between me and the darkest day of my life. Although largely liberated from its grip on me at this point, it has carved itself into the grooves of my bones and been ingrained in the fibers of my being. It will probably always live there.

On Saturday morning the first thing that occurred to me was that it was my mother-in-law's birthday and then I remembered what, unfortunately, also happened that day. Last year I woke up filled with nerves and got in a cab uptown to the hospital with every intention of showing up for mom's birthday dinner later with great news. This year I woke up also filled with shpilkes (aka : nervous energy - I don't use nearly enough Yiddish in this blog), but this time about the start of tech rehearsal weekend to which I was about to drive (gosh, the difference a year makes!). Rehearsal kept my thoughts blissfully at bay for the better part of the day. However, as I drove home later that day I started to feel a to-the-core tiredness drag me under. It wasn't so much that I was acutely sad or actively running through the events of a year ago that day, but more that there was an undeniable undertow lapping at my heels. The memories buried deep down were weighing me down from within.  As the night went on I found myself so sleepy that I was shivering and put myself to bed a respectable bedtime for a fourth grader.  

I'm not the same person I was a year ago. This year has shaped me in so many ways. The way I cope with stress and relate to other people and look at the world has undoubtedly been richened by the ripple effect of an event that occurred one year ago. I think that is what this blog has always been about. As the days and months stretch on and I share with you how it is going, I am figuring out new elements of what it means to move forward from something like this. The more I accept that my traumatic experiences have become a part of me (and an important, meaningful one at that), the more whole I feel. That's a hard thing to wrap your mind around when you are in the thick of it, so if you still are, you'll have to take my word for it. I'll be out here in the dark like a lunatic with a flashlight for you and I'll let you know what's coming up ahead. The only way out is through it. I know it's not always easy, but keep trying to believe that everything shifts in magnificent ways that you never could have anticipated if you just keep putting one foot in front of the next.